Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (597 page)

One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Cumming’s writings is
unscrupulosity of statement
.  His motto apparently is,
Christianitatem
,
quocunque modo
,
Christianitatem
; and the
only system he includes under the term Christianity is Calvinistic Protestantism.  Experience has so long shown that the human brain is a congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs that we do not pause to inquire how Dr. Cumming, who attributes the conversion of the unbelieving to the Divine Spirit, can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by argumentative white lies.  Nor do we for a moment impugn the genuineness of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his conviction that the doctrines he preaches are necessary to salvation; on the contrary, we regard the flagrant unveracity that we find on his pages as an indirect result of that conviction — as a result, namely, of the intellectual and moral distortion of view which is inevitably produced by assigning to dogmas, based on a very complex structure of evidence, the place and authority of first truths.  A distinct appreciation of the value of evidence — in other words, the intellectual perception of truth — is more closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of veracity, than is generally admitted.  There is not a more pernicious fallacy afloat, in common parlance, than the wide distinction made between intellect and morality.  Amiable impulses without intellect, man may have in common with dogs and horses; but morality, which is specifically human, is dependent on the regulation of feeling by intellect.  All human beings who can be said to be in any degree moral have their impulses guided, not indeed always by their own intellect, but by the intellect of human beings who have gone before them, and created traditions and associations which have taken the rank of laws.  Now that highest moral habit, the constant preference of truth, both theoretically and practically, pre-eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect with the impulses, as is indicated by the fact that it is only found in anything like completeness in the highest class of minds.  In accordance with this we think it is found that, in proportion as religious sects exalt feeling above intellect, and believe themselves to be guided by direct inspiration rather than by a spontaneous exertion of their faculties — that is, in proportion as
they are removed from rationalism — their sense of truthfulness is misty and confused.  No one can have talked to the more enthusiastic Methodists and listened to their stories of miracles without perceiving that they require no other passport to a statement than that it accords with their wishes and their general conception of God’s dealings; nay, they regard as a symptom of sinful scepticism an inquiry into the evidence for a story which they think unquestionably tends to the glory of God, and in retailing such stories, new particulars, further tending to his glory, are “borne in” upon their minds.  Now, Dr. Cumming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic pietist: within a certain circle — within the mill of evangelical orthodoxy — his intellect is perpetually at work; but that principle of sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from the predominance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the doctrine of verbal inspiration; what is for them a state of emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula imprisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function — the free search for truth — and making it the mere servant-of-all-work to a foregone conclusion.  Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts, as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine.  They become accustomed to reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where adverse evidence reaches demonstration they must resort to devices and expedients in order to explain away contradiction.  It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.

We have entered into this digression for the sake of mitigating the inference that is likely to be drawn from that characteristic of Dr. Cumming’s works to which we have pointed.  He is much in the same intellectual condition as that professor of Padua; who, in order to disprove Galileo’s discovery of
Jupiter’s satellites, urged that as there were only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets — a mental condition scarcely compatible with candor.  And we may well suppose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets, and no more, to be a necessary condition of salvation, his mental condition would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through Galileo’s telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his inward alarms rather than with the external fact.  So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth
as such
is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him.  The sense of alarm and haste, the anxiety for personal safety, which Dr. Cumming insists upon as the proper religious attitude, unmans the nature, and allows no thorough, calm thinking no truly noble, disinterested feeling.  Hence, we by no means suspect that the unscrupulosity of statement with which we charge Dr. Cumming, extends beyond the sphere of his theological prejudices; we do not doubt that, religion apart, he appreciates and practices veracity.

A grave general accusation must be supported by details, and in adducing those we purposely select the most obvious cases of misrepresentation — such as require no argument to expose them, but can be perceived at a glance.  Among Dr. Cumming’s numerous books, one of the most notable for unscrupulosity of statement is the “Manual of Christian Evidences,” written, as he tells us in his Preface, not to give the deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, but to furnish Scripture Readers, City Missionaries, and Sunday School Teachers, with a “ready reply” to sceptical arguments.  This announcement that
readiness
was the chief quality sought for in the solutions here given, modifies our inference from the other qualities which those solutions present; and it is but fair to presume that when the Christian disputant is not in a hurry Dr. Cumming would recommend replies less ready and more
veracious.  Here is an example of what in another place
 
he tells his readers is “change in their pocket . . . a little ready argument which they can employ, and therewith answer a fool according to his folly.”  From the nature of this argumentative small coin, we are inclined to think Dr. Cumming understands answering a fool according to his folly to mean, giving him a foolish answer.  We quote from the “Manual of Christian Evidences,” .

“Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the greatest monsters that ever walked the earth.  Mercury was a thief; and because he was an expert thief he was enrolled among the gods.  Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard, and therefore he was enrolled among the gods.  Venus was a dissipated and abandoned courtesan, and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses.  Mars was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood, and therefore he was deified and enrolled among the gods.”

Does Dr. Cumming believe the purport of these sentences?  If so, this passage is worth handing down as his theory of the Greek myth — as a specimen of the astounding ignorance which was possible in a metropolitan preacher, a.d. 1854.  And if he does not believe them . . . The inference must then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks is not a Christian virtue, but only a “splendid sin” of the unregenerate.  This inference is rendered the more probable by our finding, a little further on, that he is not more scrupulous about the moderns, if they come under his definition of “Infidels.”  But the passage we are about to quote in proof of this has a worse quality than its discrepancy with fact.  Who that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the presence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on the thought that Lord Byron’s unhappy career was ennobled and purified toward its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men?  Who has not read with deep emotion those last pathetic lines, beautiful
as the after-glow of sunset, in which love and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism?  Who has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi — the sufferer’s inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible, and the last long hours of silent pain?  Yet for the sake of furnishing his disciples with a “ready reply,” Dr. Cumming can prevail on himself to inoculate them with a bad-spirited falsity like the following:

“We have one striking exhibition of
an infidel’s brightest thoughts
, in some lines
written in his dying moments
by a man, gifted with great genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess, but of worthless principle, and yet more worthless practices — I mean the celebrated Lord Byron.  He says:

“‘Though gay companions o’er the bowl
   Dispel awhile the sense of ill,
Though pleasure fills the maddening soul,
   The heart —
the heart
is lonely still.

“‘Ay, but to die, and go, alas!
   Where all have gone and all must go;
To be the
Nothing
that I was,
   Ere born to life and living woe!

“‘Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
   Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
   Tis
something better
not to be.

“‘Nay, for myself, so dark my fate
   Through every turn of life hath been,
Man
and the
world
so much
I hate
,
   I care not when I quit the scene.’”

It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Cumming can have been so grossly imposed upon — that he can be so ill-informed as really to believe that these lines were “written” by Lord Byron in his dying moments; but, allowing him the full benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain his introduction of this feebly rabid doggrel as “an infidel’s brightest thoughts?”

In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Cumming directs most of his arguments against opinions that are either
totally imaginary, or that belong to the past rather than to the present, while he entirely fails to meet the difficulties actually felt and urged by those who are unable to accept Revelation.  There can hardly be a stronger proof of misconception as to the character of free-thinking in the present day, than the recommendation of Leland’s “Short and Easy Method with the Deists” — a method which is unquestionably short and easy for preachers disinclined to reconsider their stereotyped modes of thinking and arguing, but which has quite ceased to realize those epithets in the conversion of Deists.  Yet Dr. Cumming not only recommends this book, but takes the trouble himself to write a feebler version of its arguments.  For example, on the question of the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testament writing’s, he says: “If, therefore, at a period long subsequent to the death of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn up a book which they christened by the name of the Holy Scripture, and recorded these things which appear in it as facts when they were only the fancies of their own imagination, surely the
Jews
would have instantly reclaimed that no such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus Christ appeared in their capital, and that
their
crucifixion of Him, and their alleged evil treatment of his apostles, were mere fictions.”
  It is scarcely necessary to say that, in such argument as this, Dr. Cumming is beating the air.  He is meeting a hypothesis which no one holds, and totally missing the real question.  The only type of “infidel” whose existence Dr. Cumming recognizes is that fossil personage who “calls the Bible a lie and a forgery.”  He seems to be ignorant — or he chooses to ignore the fact — that there is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find
the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions.  Dr. Cumming’s infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to convince himself that there is no God, and that Christianity is an imposture, but who is all the while secretly conscious that he is opposing the truth, and cannot help “letting out” admissions “that the Bible is the Book of God.”  We are favored with the following “Creed of the Infidel:”

“I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not.  I believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever.  I believe that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that the body is the soul; and that after death there is neither body nor soul.  I believe there is no religion, that
natural religion is the only religion
,
and all religion unnatural
.  I believe not in Moses; I believe in the first philosophers.  I believe not in the evangelists; I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes.  I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul.  I believe not in revelation;
I believe in tradition
;
I believe in the Talmud
;
I believe in the Koran
; I believe not in the Bible.  I believe in Socrates; I believe in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I believe not in Christ.  And lastly,
I believe
in all unbelief.”